Kiki's Kanji Dictionary

Welcome to Kiki's Kanji Dictionary.
If you're studying written Japanese, Kiki can help you
learn more about Kanji characters and compounds.

If you can't read Japanese and are looking for
kanji translation
you might visit Takanori Tomita.
His site explains the different writing systems for Japanese,
and he can translate phrases or help you find the precise
characters for a kanji design.

Kiki is very different from the other online kanji dictionaries,
such as
WWWJDIC.
because you can "browse" through pages,
just like flipping through an expensive paper dictionary.
Learn about related words and their meanings,
rather than searching for a single kanji and viewing it out of context.
Each entry has clickable kanji and radicals that link
you to other kanji entries.

If you're eager to get started, try the basic search below.
Please scroll down for detailed examples, tips, and instructions!

Kiki's dictionary is large, beautful, and best of all, free!
Why?
Kiki's Kanji Dictionary combines
Jim Breen's
popular "open source"
elctronic Kanji dictionary
KANJIDIC
and his Japanese-English dictionary
EDICT.
Thank you to Dr. Breen and everyone who has contributed to these
wonderful dictionaries!

News

I've added a search to help you get started.
It's not perfect, but it's huge if you don't know how to use a kanji dictionary!

You can also study Japanese Kanji with
Java Kanji Flashcard 500
which uses Java to teach Kanji in any browser.
Check it out!

I've added
Kiki's Kanji Blog
for news about Kiki, Java Kanji Flashcards, and the state of Kanji tools
and sites on the web in general.

I had forgotten about the original,
framed version of the dictionary.
You may find it easier to get started this way.

Due to excessive bandwidth charges from my ISP,
I have temporarily taken the downloadable version of Kiki's dictionary offline.
If you really feel you need it, please ask kiki at kanjidict dot com.
If you have written recently and did not get a response,
please try this new address.
Your mail may have gotten lost in all the spam sent to the old address.

Instructions

First of all, your browser needs to be able to display Japanese.
I suggest you use a modern browser, like Firefox:

Or, check out Jim Breen's advice on
browsing in Japanese.
Why? All of the following links are to Japanese pages,
including some shortcuts for the demo:

The current demo has 19,366 compounds listed under 3,401 kanji entries.
It only includes compounds with two kanji or less,
and only KANJIDIC kanji that have a "classic" Nelson number as well as a compound in EDICT.
The pages were generated automatically in a matter of
minutes
using a Java program I have written.
(Writing the program did take a couple of weeks of my spare time.
Please email kiki at kanjidict dot com if you want the Java source code.)

Kanji Entry Page

Here is picture of a sample Kanji page,
showing some of the compounds with the kanji for "cloud".

Tips

Click any kanji to jump to the page for that kanji

Click any radical to jump to the page for that radical

Click the radical "strokes" number to jump to the radicals index

Click the < and > on radical pages to see other radicals

The kanji are color coded into four groups:
elementary,
general use,
for names,
and
rare.
Note "rare" is a bit too broad right now.
It includes many kanji that are familiar to most literate Japanese,
in addition to some truly obscure ones.

Radical Index

Each Kanji page includes a short list of radicals to the left.
For example, the kanji for "cloud" above includes the radical for "rain",
which has eight strokes.
Clicking the rain radical shows all the kanj iin the dictionary that have the
"rain" radical,
as shown in this
picture:

Indexes

Paper dictionaries don't have search boxes.
Kiki's dictionary doesn't either.
Traditional indexes can help you find kanji you are looking for.
You can practice looking up characters
while learning their radical and stroke counts.

Radicals Index

The 214 radicals are the building blocks for Kanji.
There is an index of
radicals ordered by stroke count
for all the radicals in the dictionary.
For example, the entry for "rain" and the other 8 stroke radicals
looks like this:

Kanji Index by Radical

There is also a large
all kanji index
in the dictionary, ordered by radical.
The entry for the "rain" radical in this index looks like this:

Summary Index

There is also a large index with
summaries
of all the kanji in the dictionary.
If you're desperate, you can download it and then use your
browser's search function to find kanji, readings, and
meanings.

Search

You can try a Google search for kanji in Kiki's Kanji Dictionary.
The search results will open in a new window.

For best results, search for specific kanji,
such as
雨(cutting and pasting work well)